US Covid-19 death toll surpasses 1918 flu pandemic, data reveals

More Americans have now died from Covid-19 than the number who succumbed to the 1918 flu pandemic, new data has revealed.

Despite a century of medical advances, more Americans have now died from Covid-19 than the number who succumbed to the 1918 flu pandemic, new data from Johns Hopkins University has revealed.

The latest grim milestone comes as the nation experiences its fourth-wave, largely driven by the highly infectious Delta variant and low vaccination uptake in many regions now the main cause of death.

The John Hopkins University tracker showed there have been 676,092 US coronavirus deaths (as of today), surpassing the 675,000 American deaths during the influenza outbreak that began in the last year of World War I.

Worldwide, though, the “Spanish flu” pandemic remains the deadliest event in human history according to epidemiologists, killing some 50 million people and far exceeding global Covid-19 deaths so far, which currently sit at around 4.7 million.

But America has borne a disproportionate 14 per cent of those fatalities, despite making up only five percent of the world’s population.

🇺🇸🦠 A sea of 650,000 white flags - one for every person who died from coronavirus in the US - is taking shape in front of the Washington Monument at the National Mall.

“In America: Remember” by @sbfirstenberg will be on display from Sept. 17 to Oct. 3.#COVID19pic.twitter.com/waYJDaSKdJ

— Michael Knigge (@kniggem) September 15, 2021

The country’s population more than 100 years ago was less than a third of what it is now, meaning the flu deaths would be equivalent to some 2.2 million in today’s terms.

Unlike today’s influenzas, which impact children and the elderly the most, the 1918 flu caused unusually high mortality among young adults.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with no vaccines and no antibiotics for secondary bacterial complications, control efforts were limited in 1918 and 1919 to non-pharmaceutical measures.

These included “isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants, and limitations of public gatherings”, the CDC said.

Many of the same measures, including face masks, were recommended when the Covid-19 pandemic began to creep across the world early last year.

Now, however, there are also multiple safe and highly effective vaccines that were developed and tested in record-time - which hasn’t stopped 24 per cent of US adults (almost 60 million people) from failing to get their first dose yet.

“The idea that despite having those tools available to our society we’re still allowing this virus to claim this many lives is very troubling,” director emeritus of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine’s Centre on Society and Health, Steven Woolf, told The Wall Street Journal.

But, Dr Woolf said, “a lot of those deaths” can be prevented “by changing our behaviour and getting serious about public policy”.

The mouth of a Covid-19 patient on a ventilator is seen in the ICU of Indiana’s Baptist Health Floyd. Picture: Jon Cherry/Getty Images/AFP

Vaccine uptake has been hit by a polarised political climate and what experts call an epistemological crisis. Picture: Kena Betancur/AFP

In Health Affairs earlier this year, Virginia Tech history professor, E. Thoomas Ewing, wrote that the prolonged toll of Covid-19 has not reflected well on America’s pandemic response.

“The fact that deaths surged at the end of 2020, nine months after the pandemic reached the United States, with the highest daily death tolls in early January 2021, is perhaps the most discouraging comparison to the historical record [of 1918],” he wrote.

“We ignored the lessons of 1918, and then we disregarded warnings issued in the first months of this pandemic.”

Vaccine uptake has been hit by a polarised political climate and what experts call an epistemological crisis, with misinformation supercharging vaccine hesitancy to historically new heights.

Beyond vaccines, effective treatments have been developed such as monoclonal antibodies, corticosteroids to dial down hyperactive immune response in patients with severe Covid, and advanced ventilators.

As for the 1918 flu, descendants of the H1N1 strain that continue to make up the seasonal influenza viruses we fight today, with far less severity.